I used to like the Huffington Post a lot, run by…. you know the story. Look, I even gave Arianna – or is it AOL – a link. But come on on guys, simple pumping out the Reuters news feed is a bif naff.

Here is the headline.

AT&T Sues Users Who Want To Block T-Mobile Buy

Hypnotists are thinking of using the headline to put users into a deeper trance, it made me take a one way trip to snoozeville.

And here is the story.

AT&T Inc is turning to the federal courts to thwart an effort led by law firm Bursor & Fisher to derail AT&T’s $39 billion takeover bid for Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile.

Real page turner right. But come on, any good SEO worth his weight in PR knows what’s going on here. Get a blog Google loves and then start pumping out the soporific dross which will cause a mind numbing freeze to take place. Only released by repeated visits to the Onion.

From a business POV it makes sense, because this is how Google does the Internet. Should you do it, of course, it’s a proven model. Should I do it, I think I may have to if I want that Aston Martin.

Know what Kate Plus 8 means, me neither until today. It was a reality show on TLC which was recently cancelled, which gives us enough information to know not to go any further.

But what was weird is when I googled the term (I noticed it come up in some trackers I use) howimakestuffworks.com was the domain which came up.

Now I thought howimakestuffworks.com would be about telling me how stuff works. But now, they stick on the tlc sub-domain and suddenly the tail is wagging the dog. Possibly because Google gives howimakestuffworks.com they have decided to dump as much content on their as possible and soak up CPM advertising goodness.

Does this make the search experience worse or better. Not sure, as the page offered up was the official page, just on an odd url. This possibly pushes all the user generated fan pages to the bottom of the swamp, but is that a good thing.

If you had two options on Google, one for the brand loving official stuff and one for the wet and wild user generated fan stuff, which would get pushed the most?

My thinking is the user gen stuff as it’s more authentic, more from the heart. More passionate.

But saying all that, from a pure business play, howimakestuffworks.com is probably doing the right thing.

However, the expert will tell you that there isn’t an absolute answer, the answer is relative. In other words, it depends.

The number of factors which you should consider when deciding which is the best SEO company are many and what you should really be asking is not which is the best, but which is the best for you?

For example:

How much is your budget?
What specific goals do you want to achieve?
What are your businesses resources?
Do you have a current SEO strategy?
What is your overall online marketing strategy?
Do you prefer a local company which can give face to face time?
What level of reporting do you require from the SEO company?
Do you have any in-house SEO or web design experience?
Do you need the same SEO agency to also be able to implement your social media strategy?
Do you need an SEO agency who has knowledge of Local search?
Is your website going to be pulling data from a database and deploying data dynamically?
Do you need the agency to provide in-house training?
Would you require Adwords expertise?
Are you comfortable with a “work from the bedroom-seo-ninja-mercenary-assassin”, who may laugh in your face when you explain you don’t know what .htaccess is, or do you need an agency with a pot plant in the corner and a fit blonde with very white teeth on reception and generic pictures on the wall bought from B & Q?
Do you need an SEO company that will not only get you ranked in Google but will understand you business and help you develop a customer conversion strategy that will increase your profit.
Do you need a link building service rather than a general seo agency?
Do you have your own access to writers or do you want to outsource your writing to the agency?

And I could probably go on and on. But you probably get the picture. An expert in the field will instantly know which SEO company will suit you. The answer to “Which is the best UK SEO company?” Is there isn’t one, it’s the wrong question to ask.

“Which is the best UK SEO company for my business?”, however, is a better question.

Although even that needs to be qualified. In my experience no two seo agencies offer the same type of service. You could hire an independent expert to find the best for you, but how could you really know they would not be biased?

The reality is, only an expert can truly spot another expert, which means you must go on other indicators.

The best way to find a great SEO service provider is through personal recommendations rather than asking Google.

The difference between an SEO who has tested commenting on blogs and one who hasn’t is that the one who hasn’t says it doesn’t work and the one who has keeps quiets about it and keeps commenting.

As an SEO it also marks you out as to whether they are in the Premier League or still slugging it out for the pub team.

Some SEO “experts” will see say, “nofollow”, doesn’t pass juice. End of.

This is a mistake.

A blog comment is an advert, it is a branding tool, it will add to the sum of how people perceive you. How people perceive you has a direct impact on whether they will link to you.

For example, when SEO “experts” say blog commenting is useless, my perception of their skill as an SEO is further informed.

It’s well known that blogs and their comments get scraped and nofollow removed.

A visible link means that a human can visit the site and drop a dofollow if they like what they see.

Blog owners tend to check out the links left in the blog comments, which means you can get very important bloggers to come to your site.

A blog comment can demonstrate your skill in an area and make people go, “ooohhhhhh, she’s good.”

If blog spamming did not work, do you really think it would still be happening? What’s interesting about the nofollow that was introduced to blogs to stop spamming is that it hasn’t done anything to stop it.

Also, even when the link was dofollow and SEO’s would look at a blog and say, “but it’s not a real website”

Does this mean that you should go out and leave “Great post”, in the comments of as many blogs as you can find. No, because there is a way to blog comment and there is a way to not.

Blog commenting is a tool in the tool box, brought out for specific tasks and for specific reasons. I’m not not going to give you a step by step guide of how to do it as you probably have a massive brain (you’re reading this blog) and have worked it out on your own by now.

However, I am always willing to listen to the other side of the argument and so if you have data on to show that blog commenting is useless I would love to hear it.

One of the problems of course is that it can be really boring if you hae no opinion and that outsourcing it can lower the quality.

It’s tricky, which means if you hit the sweet spot there are few others creaming it.

But, I am not going to be adding to its database, unless it’s to do a bit of reputation management for clients.

Also, if lots of places start scraping it, it may be worth dropping a link, even if it is nofollow.

There are going to be specific advantages to using Quora, however it’s not going to be what the site owners originally intended. If you are in the business of getting people to go to your website to buy stuff or you have clients who need people to go to their website to buy stuff, I would take a very close interest in Quora.

Why?

Because it’s going to get eyeballs, and it looks like it is going to crush Yahoo answers and those SEO mercenary, Ninja assassins are already knee deep in Yahoo answers gore, getting websites to rank.

So, expect an e-book to pop up entitled, The Ultimate Guide to Using Quora to rank in Google. Expect to pay $47. But, not from me, I would never give away such great info. Only my paying clients get the good stuff 😉

My advice, open an account at Quora, have a little play. Do a few tests. See if you can rank for a keyword.

But don’t use it to throw up tons of original, interesting content. Have you any idea how much you are worth an hour?

Note: Apologies for the use of “Ultimate”. I should be ashamed.

Note 2: This did start as a comment at Quora when I thought, “Don’t be a Numpty!”

Note 3: If you secretly share your SEO Quora tip with me, I will secretly share that I have back at you.

This is the question that in my Twitter feed every SEO is thinking, but none are asking. A search for this on Quora leads to How will Quora fight spam. Hmmm, doesn’t really answer the question does it.

I for one will not be spamming Quora, I will simply include a link to a website that will be beneficial to my bank balance and that of my clients. Because as we know, it’s wrong to use Web 2.0 properties for personal gain.

Come, let us sit round the camp fire and sing praises to humanity.

Update: From the Quoara page on spam.

We have a bunch of ideas but we’re not really sure yet; right now, everyone in the system is pretty good, and so it’s hard to really tell where the abuse will come from.

Make my marshmallow nice and toasty.

I’m thinking that the naive, techno hippy quotient may be a little on the high side and they need to find the most evil, badass black hat SEO and get him on the team now. It will be their most valuable hire ever.

A lot of people ask me if I do seo in Cornwall. Which is a fair question, the site is after all called Cornwall SEO.

When I first started offering SEO services I quickly realised my skills were not best spent in the local market, or even in a more National market. It quickly became apparent that the key to helping a client market their website was to build links. If your website is small and local there is no need to hire an seo professional as long as you do the following.

Research your keywords

Stick keywords in title tags

Produce as many quality pages that reflect the context of the site as possible.

Grab as many links as possible, making sure the anchor text reflects the context of the site.

However, if you are operating in a competitive sector and you don’t simply want to rank for “St. Ives chocolate”, or you’re pulling your web pages from a large dbase, or you have a shopping system with thousands of products, or you are a large company operating in a large pond, then you don’t just want a regular SEO. You need an uber seo.

You need an SEO who kicks serious ass and who can take down the big boys.

I know what you’re thinking, is he leading us to a sales pitch?

Nope, although maybe I should.

The point is, there are many different types of seo professional for many needs. If you want me to recommend one I will be glad to and depending on your needs I will be able to send you to the right one.

I focus on linkbuilding, or more accurately, buzz marketing. I use techniques like social media marketing and linkbaiting to create buzz about your website. Which is only useful for a select bunch of web properties.

If you want to read my words you are going to have to read them here. If I twitter it, all I get is a bunch of retweets by people who are too ADD to read the article and to help Twitter build its business.

Which makes me think of another headline for this article, “Why I wont Tweet Rand Fishkin”. I will use that on the tweet to announce the post. It has lots of elements of a great headline, which I may deconstruct in a later post.

I recommend the article to anyone who needs a blueprint to being a great seo.

I just found that Megan Fox nude is the fourth most searched for term in a clients websites. Not sure how to tell them as they don’t really understand how seo works. It’s a new client so nothing to do with me.

How should you tell a Brick Merchant that he is now ranking in Google for Megan Fox nude?

Gandi, the ethical domain company have published an extensive report regarding the so called, “Liberalisation of the Internet”.

It’s certainly generated a lot of buzz with some people saying this will change the way the Internet operates, and others that it’s a cynical way to make money. It’s certainly going to be interesting to watch how it effects the Internet.

Obviously this is important to how SEO is implemented, but what do the experts think? I have asked a number of industry experts and professionals to give their opinion.

Mark Nunney

From where I search, www.hotels-london.co.uk is No.1 on Google for the search ‘hotels london’. This is partly because “hotels-london” is included in the text of many inbound links and Google’s algo likes this. If Google will also consider the domain extension as link text, eg .hotels, as in london.hotels, then $186,000 for some new gTLDs might seem cheap. What will .poker be worth? And does anyone fancy chipping in and buying .sex, if you know what I mean?

The only clear winner of the proposed new TLDs is ICANN – at $185K per
application, that’s a gravy train they are going to want to ride for many
years.

Some large companies will get their own TLD, but I doubt that it will be
very many. Big companies are not in the business of changing people?s
internet habits, especially when their current habits work fine for big
companies.

There will probably be many who start their own TLD to sell the promise of
quick riches to gullible speculators. Most of these TLDs will fail but
there will likely be a few success stories.

It will be very difficult for new TLDs to succeed as they will be
competing against the weight of all companies who advertise with
established TLDs. If I were to bet which ones stand the best chance of
succeeding I?d say geo TLDs where there is a large population and active
local government support ? such as .nyc.

The liberalisation of domain extensions will, to my mind, cause early adopters and nay-sayers alike to soil their collective briefs. There will be a hullabaloo over companies and individuals who do register their own TLDs as well as those who don’t.

Ultimately companies who choose to promote their industries, as opposed to themselves, will be the winners. Registering .bank makes much more sense than registering .royalbankofscotland for exampl – whichever bank does this first will forever have an advantage within that TLD and as such within their industry!

Plain stupid for most cases, from an SEO point of view with more localisation in the search engines how the hell are they going to GEO target them by IP well that don’t work so well at the moment, I can see a few possible uses from the Branding side like bmw :

Liberalisation of domain names has been a topic for a while, but you only have to look at the record of non-TLDs – .info, .biz, .tel, .mobi – to see that these have effectively been an abject failure in user terms. New domain names do not communicate trust and do not empower consumers – they merely act to cash in for registrars in my opinion.

Brands have to buy new domain extensions, opportunities try to find clever names with new extensions. After that, it’s a process of barrel scraping.

In the meantime, liberalisation will not kill the public perception that TLD’s such as .com and .co.uk are the most important, and won’t turn around the fact that if you cannot register a brand on a .com or .co.uk extension, you’ll normally be unable to build it, because you need the authority those extensions are already granted by users.

Overall, I think the internet is going through an experimentation phase – but I think most of the changes cater for a very small minority of technical users, and few new internet innovations over the past 5 years have developed into anything that caters for the mainstream and remains viable. There’s especially a danger continued changes to existing services will alienate users – you only have to look at the recent autosuggest and local changes on Google.co.uk to see how the user experience is being damaged through forced extension of features.

Web 2 is a complete joke – it’s the lauding of chatter – and the more new features are built into the internet, the more confusing and inaccessible the internet becomes overall for mainstream users, and the more niche and segmented existing internet audiences become.

The liberalisation of domain names simply extends the process in which the internet is moving away from user experience because of the confusion it will generate, and the lack of importance or value everyday internet users will be able to associate with them IMO.

“I think this presents a massive opportunity for savvy marketers. Brands will have to be on their guard too as squatters and non bonafide people try to exploit this to the max.

It will also be interesting to see how the search engines interpret these in the SERPs also, will a trainers.nike domain be more relevant than say a nike.trainers domain and how will brands get a hold on this minefield generally?

With keyword variants and combinations running into huge numbers, it’s easy to see the potentials. The opportunities for affiliate marketers can’t be understated either. A nice .brand or keyword domain may also have a significant visual advantage over established brands and traditional stronghold.

Whilst ICANN have probably given this some thought, I’d still expect to read about the odd dispute or two! ”

As a professional ?White Hat Domainer? ? and more importantly, a domain investor and brand builder ? I do have a few comments regarding the ?liberalisation? of the Internet vis-? -vis ICANN?s proposal to offer an unlimited number of new TLDs (Top Level Domains) known in the trade as ?extensions?.

Firstly, for those of us in the business, the issues discussed in the report prepared by Gandi are old news. That is not to say it isn?t an important document. For the lay person it is a well-crafted and I would say an essential resource. I plan to make it a permanent part of my resource list for ready reference, and may include it in my soon-to-be-launched series of resource websites.

Whilst the impetus behind ICANN?s decision to open a plethora of new TLD?s is novel, I don?t believe it will have the impact and financial return for which ICANN hopes. There is a very high cost barrier to entry that will be out of reach to most… the USD 185k registration fee. Moreover, what the lay person doesn?t understand is that this will require the registrant to operate a Registry for the TLD, with it?s concomitant running costs ? not cheap.

In this liberal Internet, the new TLDs will add to consumer confusion and will almost certainly require the use of a search engine to locate the TLD. The typical end user isn?t going to know that Coca Cola has registered the .coke TLD and won?t know to make a ?type-in? request via his or her address bar in their browser. Said another way, once the 185k has been spent, who is going to spend another 500k to promote the TLD to the public, to make it a cognitive process in the mind of the consumer? Yeah, Coca-Cola might, but I aint!

Many new releases of TLDs, both general (gTLD) and country-specific (ccTLD) have flopped, regardless of the large numbers of domain registrations touted by the registries.

For instance, I have gone to tremendous expense to register thousands of domains to protect my brand; but, I would not consider taking a new TLD in my brand. Rather, I will let another entrepreneur take the TLD, and if I feel it is of benefit I will register my brand in that TLD.

Unlike most domainers or domain investors, I have gone to the trouble of trademarking my brand, and I do protect it vigorously and do not shy away from a UDRP challenge as and when cyber-squatted. I can also say that the arbitration panelists have moved ever closer to protecting trademark holders, thereby closing the foolish loophole that currently exists in ICANN?s come-one-come-all domain registration policy.

I believe that it will take years for the liberalisation to occur, if it succeeds. Personally, I feel it is a non-starter created by ICANN to glean revenues and exploit the uninformed.

In most cases opening the web up with more TLD’s is just going to create confusion for consumers, for example is NewYork.NewYork where I should look or NewYork.com. of course there’s never any guarantee that the .com is the best source for information but starting from zero it’s not a bad place to make your start. While all of the good omains where registered years ago and the secondary prices can in some cases be astronomical building a business on an second tier domain isn’t a good idea either, people are always going to check the .com version of your domain first.

The one exception is movies, I think movies should have their own TLD. Too often today you’ll see a movie come out and the name of the movie with a .com on the end is taken. Studios have gone the subdomain route or add “themove.com” onto the end neither of which is intuitive. However a .movie TLD should be regulated by a film industry to only movies of a certain level, not amatuer or film school students, similar to the way .travel is only open to travel agents or travel professionals.

People will still use search, I do not see that changing, and I very much doubt people will be guessing domain extensions like .apple or .microsoft for quite a while. These new extensions will be had for vanity purposes and new web services, but ordinary folks already are unclear on .info and .mobi so the dotcom will still be prized real estate. I do not think this will alter the perception of anything other than dotcom and your local country domain being the prized asset. Expect to see a land grab, and third tier domain prices dropping in the domaining space. I feel sorry for global brands who will now have even more extensions to protect, and phishing could also be a problem if a clever authentic looking extension is found to exploit.

Will you be snapping up .cornwall ? 🙂 Who will be first to try to get .seo? 🙂

The .com / .net / .org domain extensions are so fundamentally baked into the fabric of the web that I find it difficult to see when that will significantly change. They certainly aren’t about to keel over and die any time soon.

Having said that, ICANN’s liberalisation will create a lot of new opportunities, both positive and negative. One thing is for sure: big brands will need to broaden their domain acquisitions to protect their reputations from being undermined by yourbrand.sucks etc.

On the one hand I think the whole thing could lead to confusion and loads of people not understanding what your domain is (have you ever tried to explaining .uk.com as a domain over the phone?) but on the other hand I would quite like to register patrickaltoft.seo as a
domain.

Just like de.licio.us showed us how to make the .us domain interesting, no doubt some new service will hit it big with a new gTLD. As usual I imagine we will see a lot of early innovation in this area from the porn industry as .lez and its ilk become ubiquitous.

“More than anything else the new name spaces and the cost to start them will provide opportunities for new ventures. Just like people by vanity domain names, people will want to buy vanity domain extensions. The price of those is likely not to come down too soon, which is where the opportunity for new ventures is created.

To give small to midsized companies as well as individuals or groups of individuals a chance to register a TLD extension will be one of the first services built around the liberalization.

That said, a huge amount of water still has to pass under the bridge as trust in these new domain extensions will initially be near absent and, after the first waves of low quality spamming such as seen with .info, then rapidly declining… Dot com will be with us for a long time.”

The liberalization of domain extensions is already grabbing the attention of Fortune 500 companies. One of our high profile clients recently looped us in on an internal memo amongst key mid to high-level executives.

The gist of the memo was concerning the importance of securing key branded extensions to ensure that they could continue to control their brand and protect it from potential squatters.

We recommended that they definitely secure all of their brand extensions but also suggested that .com would likely continue to be the gold standard for domain extensions. 15 years of mainstream internet sites ending in .com have made this extension a de facto standard of sorts (similar to the position of the gas and break pedals in an automobile).

Kevin Gibbons

To be honest I think it?s all a big money making scheme. For example, brands will feel that they need to secure .[company-name] and .[keyword] domains to ensure that no-one else can register these and potentially damage their online reputation.

I certainly don?t think this means the end of the .com. In my opinion, these website?s will not be trusted anywhere near as highly as .com/.net/.co.uk domains, especially in the short-term, and I wouldn?t recommend building a brand on a newly created TLD.

Domain names are very important when trying to build an online brand, so you don?t want your domain to be confused with the .com version if this is already secured. Rather than creating a new extension to grab a similar domain to what you are looking for, I would recommend trying to be more creative with the domain name you choose instead. Think digg.com, sphinn.com, stumbleupon.com or twitter.com which may not be natural choices at first. Then you can start building a brand instead of risking losing traffic to the original .com site.

The Icaan liberalization does not necessarily seem geared towards the user.
I am cynic but I see a money-making exercise when I look at the information coming out, such as the $186,000 fee to create a custom domain extension.
You have to wonder why the offer is being offered in the coming year especially as there is still plenty of latitude in existing domain extensions such as .biz, .tv and .info. There were a number of elements we considered, including:

– Lockdown – If the BBC pays to create .bbc is it then their license or can others apply for a prefix of the domain
– Will the process precipitate the launch of a new breed of on-topic domain rich scraper sites being used for link building
– Is there any real benefit to a solicitors want xyx.solictors, when they may already have xyzsolicitors.com

Another example of where the system may play a part is in Geo Targeting.
Will Google recognize a city name within a domain extension such as .London as part of. Will this just lead to a scramble for domains such as plumbers.london or florists.london and what parameters are in place to prevent individuals and businesses snapping up domains they have no real claim for?

A further problem we can see happening is domains being typed incorrect; for example, I own domainname.com and I change this to domain.name, we can see users still adding the .com entity to the domain.

There are so many ways of looking at the liberalization of domain naming. I really have a split view, I can see pros and cons. I can also see clients becoming confused; smart agencies should be communicating with clients and appraising whether the offering is appropriate to the longevity of their online projects.

On a wider notion I have always advocated the sex industry be restricted to using .xxx or .sex domain extensions. This would be easier to police from a Net filtration perspective on family computers, it would be great if Icaan were paying more attention to helping to protect web users as well as make money from them.

Simply providing 14,000 new colors with which to paint the prison bars does not give us freedom. What we really need to work on is connecting as many as possible and letting information flow freely between them. We’re just not there yet, and this is another distraction.

“I believe that the liberalization of domain extensions was a bad move by ICAAN. It will add a great deal of confusion on the web, as the end user won’t know what extension means what. If I am not wrong companies interested in having their own extension will need to pay over $100,000 in fees, and this could have been the motivation for the whole thing.

After a while, though, I believe people will head back to the established extensions. Inside the mess of .nyc, .porn, .microsoft and .toys, people will just type .com or .org, because they know those will work. Interestingly enough, the liberalization of top level extensions could strengthen the .com majesty.

And this point raises the following question: would a company be better off spending $100,000 to buy its own extension or spending the same $100,000 to buy a premium one-word domain with a .com extension?

“The change makes sense to me as it will allow many businesses and individuals to have the freedom to use a domain name that matches their company, without having to worry too much that it has already been taken as they could use a different but memorable variation like joesplumbing.usa. Unfortunately, as always, spammers and domain ‘squatters’ will cause problems. Biggest problem is that they will use it to earn of other companies brand names and also use mis-spells like apple.xom. Despite the changes I still think that .com domains will remain most recognisable to consumers and therefore remain the most-sought after top level domain.”

Innovation and choice or a money making scheme? Either way registering your company name could be about to get a whole lot more expensive! There may be some obvious advantages on a local level to be able to register as a .nyc or .london and it’s possible to see how larger brands would welcome the opportunity to own their own top level domain (TLD).

However for the average SME the set up cost of $186,000 to register a bespoke TLD is totally prohibitive. I’d also question how many companies who have a well established, authoritative domain, currently in the form of a .com or .co.uk would be prepared to redirect their existing primary URL to a new bespoke TLD… especially when it could turn out to be a bit of a fad.

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